Leonid Pesin

About The Artist:

Leonid Pesin (b. 1956, Kharkiv, lives in Australia) belonged to the Gosprom group for all the time of its existence. Pesin’s black and white documentary images ruthlessly pictured the barefaced reality of the Soviet Union’s last years. Ruin and decay were welcomed subjects of his work. While close to social reportage, his images were still finely composed and almost always formally immaculate.

Glassworks Factory and The Hospital (1980 - 1985) showed the conditions the working class (the engine of social progress according to Soviet propaganda) had to live, work and obtain medical treatment.

May 5, 1987 was the day when a large group of American and European photographers were allowed (or even invited) to visit the USSR to take photos of the country’s life. Boris Mikhailov organized Kharkiv artists for a simultaneous street photography session that very day. Pesin’s humorous images of newspapers and TV screens provided a documented proof of Khakiv photographers’ participation.

The Derbent series (1986) pictured the life of a town on the Caspian Sea shore of the Caucasus Mountains (now in Russia). This masterfully executed project was also a ruthless document revealing the poverty of the population and devastated human living conditions of a once wealthy old city.

Pesin’s 1984 refers to the famous George Orwell’s novel and was in fact produced that year. It is a reportage from a correctional facility for juvenile offenders and to be allowed to take photos there the artist had to pretend he was applying for a job as a photographer with the institution. Later, during Perestroyka times, Pesin successfully exhibited this work in Moscow, but when he risked exhibiting it in Kharkiv, it was immediately confiscated. The next day the police arrived to search his darkroom, but a friend had removed all potentially incriminating prints and films early in the morning and Pesin had made copies of the 1984 negatives.